Wednesday, June 21, 2017

John Carpenter Revisited: DARK STAR (1974)

John Carpenter on the set of DARK STAR

When I was about seven years old, I watched John Carpenter’s
THE FOG on late night TV.I was not allowed to watch R-rated movies, so I had to press my face against the
screen of the tiny black-and-white TV set in my bedroom and turn the sound way down so my parents wouldn’t know what I was doing. During the third act, my heart was pounding... not just because I was afraid for the people of Antonio Bay, but because I was deathly afraid that someone would make me stop watching the movie before I could see how it ended. The circumstances were just right that night for the fog
to seep into my imagination and stay there.

In subsequent years, John Carpenter’s other films began to
make a big impression on me, one-by-one.They didn’t just influence my taste in movies; they influenced my
perspective on the world, fueling a sometimes-unhinged balance of romanticism
and cynicism. Most viewers these days seem to assume that Carpenter is a resolute cynic.He can be.But he’s also a filmmaker whose work doesn’t lend itself to quick, easy
interpretations or intellectualization.He’s what critics used to call a “pure cinema” filmmaker.He tells stories through pictures in motion, plus sound, and his stories are meant to flood the viewer with emotion—not to be
picked apart as metaphors, allegories, or political treatises.(Which is not to say that his films do not
sometimes function brilliantly as metaphors, allegories, or political
treatises.Ahem, THEY LIVE.)

This week, I’m gearing up to re-watch all of John
Carpenter’s movies, from DARK STAR to THE WARD.Because
I’m a writer by trade (and compulsion), I will also be writing about them.And because I don’t like to do anything in a simple, casual way (did I mention “compulsion”?), I will also be watching each
film on a double bill with a non-Carpenter film.The pairings will not
be random, but they might seem random at first.I
will do my best to explain as I go….

I’m kicking things off with John Carpenter’s first
theatrical feature, DARK STAR.“Theatrical” is a bit of a stretch, since DARK STAR is an expanded
student film.Carpenter and his USC film
school chum Dan O’Bannon began working on it in 1970, and kept working on it for
three years.During that time, an old
b-movie producer named Jack Harris came along and gave them a few extra bucks
to expand the film for theatrical release.The two starry-eyed film students did just that, and DARK STAR was
released in 1974 to universal silence.

Carpenter and O’Bannon were undoubtedly disheartened by the
film’s commercial failure… but it didn’t slow them down for very long.Five years later, they were both being hailed
as creative geniuses—for HALLOWEEN and ALIEN, respectively.After that, DARK STAR was granted a second
life on VHS as the brainchild of two young prodigies. Naturally, the film has been viewed as a
forerunner of the more-famous films.Some
people insist that the beach ball “alien mascot” in DARK STAR was the prototype
for the xenomorph in ALIEN. O’Bannon
himself more or less confirmed this when he said that the rationale for making
ALIEN was “If you can’t make it funny, make it scary.” By drawing the comparison, O’Bannon also more
or less claimed that he was the primary creator of the “alien mascot”
sequence.

I have always loved this little guy.

Dan O'Bannon (as Sgt. Pinback) in a tight spot.

Carpenter has refuted the claim.Watching the sequence today, it’s easy to view
it as a stylistic forerunner to the suspense sequences in HALLOWEEN.The studied reliance on long takes, the
careful establishment of geography, and the absolute faith in silence and ambient drones all scream "John Carpenter." This sequence
is obviously the work of a strong visual storyteller developing his style.

A few years ago, I interviewed Carpenter for my horror doc
NIGHTMARES IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE, and he told me that the great thing about
film school was that it forced him to take the time to figure out why
certain techniques worked.This is
something that viewers today—especially young viewers—don’t do as much, because
so many movies are available to us that we rarely study them obsessively.
(Or am I projecting?I’ll speak for myself…) I was humbled
by Carpenter’s simple observation that watching
movies and really studying movies, as a prospective filmmaker, is
two different things.

One of the films that Carpenter studied endlessly at USC was
Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE
THE BOMB.Tonally it has a lot in common
with DARK STAR, so I almost picked DR. STRANGELOVE as the second film on my
double bill.I might just as easily have
picked Kubrick’s subsequent film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.DARK STAR is obviously an adoring mashup of
these two films, fusing the satirical humor of one with the awe and wonder of
the other.The filmmakers themselves
advertised this point with a pair of tag lines identifying the film as a
“spaced-out odyssey” and a “mission of the Strangelove Generation.”

But instead of harping on these comparisons (or because it’s
already been done) I decided to watch a different film—the film that turned
John Carpenter into a sci-fi enthusiast. In a 1978 interview on “The Slow
Evolution of DARK STAR,” the director said, “I was only eight years old when I
first saw FORBIDDEN PLANET, but… the young eyes that watched the invisible Id
creature make its huge footprints in the sand of Altair 4 and finally saw the
thing fully illuminated in the flowing laser beams would never be the
same.”In later interviews, he claimed
that it was this experience that made him want to become a filmmaker—because he
wanted to emotionally transport people away from their problems and
mundane realities, to other worlds.

FORBIDDEN PLANET

The first time I saw FORBIDDEN PLANET was at a
midnight show at the NARO Theater in Norfolk, Virginia—in a gorgeously lush CinemaScope
print and stereophonic sound, and with a very enthusiastic audience.I guess you could say that the experience was
the opposite of my experience of watching THE FOG for the first time…. but the
effect was the same.The effect of all
great movies on all receptive viewers (regardless of the screen size) is the
same: They transport you.

Some aspects of FORBIDDEN PLANET have not
dated well, but many of the visuals remain hypnotic.The matte painting used in the Krell ventilator shaft, for
instance, is just as awe-inspiring as any digital effect in
2017.(And surely it was an influence on
the elevator shaft sequence in DARK STAR.)I was also moved by the stop-motion sequence in which Morbius shows off
his hi-tech security system…. perhaps because of how low-tech it is.Such effects seemed exotic in the early
1950s… and now they seem exotic again, like all practical effects in a digital
world.It’s not about nostalgia for
something quaint; it’s about stimulating the imagination by showing audiences something they aren’t used to seeing.

If nothing else, re-watching this film a few days ago
transported me to another time: 1950s
America, the heyday of science fiction cinema, and a time when so much of our collective
knowledge about outer space was based on speculation.There’s an inherent sense of starry-eyed wonder in
FORBIDDEN PLANET—and that’s why the film is still compelling, more than fifty
years later.

DARK STAR is, in my opinion, even more of a product of its time.In the early 70s, science fiction movies were
in a transitional phase, between 2001 and STAR WARS. I think DARK STAR has more in common with
contemporary films like SILENT RUNNING or SOYLENT GREEN than it does with with
FORBIDDEN PLANET or STAR WARS.Thankfully, unlike SILENT RUNNING and SOYLENT GREEN, DARK STAR has a
sense of humor to give it some lasting vitality.

In his book The Films of John Carpenter, author John Kenneth Muir suggests that
the film was actually ahead of its time.Muir characterizes DARK STAR as “the first slacker film,” a forerunner
to the self-conscious Gen X cinema of filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin
Smith.Sarcasm and
satire mostly overwhelm the sense of awe and wonder in DARK STAR, but the battle between cynicism and romanticism rages on in all John Carpenter's subsequent films.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Author - Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (McFarland, 2004), The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences (McFarland, 2009), Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen (Bloody Pulp, 2011), To Hell You Ride (Dark Horse Comics, 2013), A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin (BearManor, 2014), Beyond Fear: Reflections on Stephen King, Wes Craven and George Romero's Living Dead (BearManor, 2014), and The Quick, The Dead and the Revived: The Many Lives of the Western Film (McFarland, 2016).